In 1989, an ardent cinephile was arrested for impersonating Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a celebrated figure in Iranian filmmaking. And who can blame the fraudulent admirer? We would quite like to belong to the Makmalbaf family too. If there were poet laureates of cinema, then Mohsen Makhmalbaf, his wife and three children would surely be heralded for their profound films, which shimmer with hope and with beauty.

Flecks of fairytale thinking are threaded into Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Gabbeh (1996), a marriage plot woven around the obstacles that a father fabricates to defer his daughter’s desires. Across interludes of feminine longing, the film basks in fields of wildflowers and the vibrant yarn of the eponymous rugs. Both a fulsome celebration of color on film like Gabbeh and a stirring ode to sound, Makhmalbaf’s The Silence (1998) follows a blind boy to markets and workshops in Tajikistan. Attuned closely to harmonious music and pretty voices, he abandons the demands of work and drifts into a world that reverberates with pleasure.

After her father formed the Makhmalbaf Film House in 1996, seventeen-year-old Samira Makhmalbaf had the support to realize an extraordinary first feature, The Apple (1998). Akin to Abbas Kiarostami’s work both in its delicate blend of documentary and fiction and in its commitment to education, the film unspools a true-to-life story of twins who lived in confinement for a decade. Though a troubling tale of parental neglect, the teenager’s film beams with the regard of an older sister as it observes the two little girls moving gradually, curiously out into the world. Often flouting censorship to forge cinematic alliances with women and children, the Makhmalbafs’ contributions to Iranian society resonate far beyond the treasures that they crafted for the screen.